Prior to photographing, the dragonfly’s wings were marked in a grid pattern with black ink in order to provide anchor points to aid in reconstructing their 3D shape as they deform while flapping. The initial 3D wings and body were generated with Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces using Autodesk Maya by aligning vertices corresponding to the first level of the subdivision surface hierarchy with the anchor points on the wings.

Marked Wings and Surface Reconstruction

The wings were then animated with key frame animation by repeating the anchor point based alignment process along each axis at each time step of the images of the flying dragonfly taken with the high speed camera’s. Since anchor points are available on both the interior of the wing and the edges, an approximation of the true 3D shape of the wings as they bend and twist is captured with the smooth subdivision surface representation. In frames where the wings rotate such that the location of the anchor points along one or more axes is not discernable, reconstructions were performed at adjacent frames and spline interpolation was used to estimate anchor point location at the unclear frame.

Key Frame Animation